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Core reality

By Marcus Chown

FOR a theory that has the world’s finest physicists baffled, quantum mechanics is fantastically successful. It has made possible computers, lasers and nuclear reactors and explained how the Sun shines and why the ground beneath our feet is solid. But it is also strange, frustrating and incomprehensible. It insists that the microscopic world is a shadowy realm where nothing is certain – where an electron can be in two places at once and photons at opposite extremes of the Universe can communicate by some kind of weird telepathy.

But some physicists are beginning to suspect that there’s another level of reality beneath the quantum world. Nobel prizewinner Gerard’t Hooft believes that underpinning quantum weirdness is an old-fashioned deterministic theory – one in which there’s a simple relationship between cause and effect. Antony Valentini of Imperial College in London has now gone even further. He thinks that quantum mechanics may not always have applied, and that in the early Universe matter danced to a different tune. What’s more, some non-quantum stuff may even have survived to this day, tantalising us with the possibility of eavesdropping on secure cryptographic channels, constructing computers which outperform even the fastest quantum computers and, most remarkable of all, sending signals faster than the speed of light.

The reason for believing in a deeper level is that quantum theory merely predicts the probable outcomes of measurements, not certainties. To Valentini, it’s a bit like an actuary predicting the probability that a man will die at a particular age. “This does not preclude a deeper level of cause and effect, which could be used to predict precisely …